On Obtaining Chroma

Chroma is the dragon-like character in Warframe. He breathes fire, he has elemental powers, he’s big and bulky and dragon-like and he rips his skin off and turns it into a dragon minion that kills people. But holy fucking Bahrag is this motherfucker hard to fucking get.

I kid you not.

To build Chroma, you need five things. Firstly you need to complete a rather simple quest, the New Strange, in which you see a ‘feral Chroma’ attacking Corpus and Grineer and have to track it down. Cephalon Simaris, a self-proclaimed gatherer of knowledge, keeper of the (purely digital) Santuary and essentially Hermaeus Mora’s Warframe cousin, uses you as bait to capture the bastard but you end up being fine in the end. The reward for this series of quests is the blueprint for Chroma.

Pictured: Not Chroma, but Cephalon Simaris. Bastard.

This blueprint consists of Chroma’s Systems, Chassis and Neuroptics. But you also need the blueprints for these three items. You obtain the blueprints for the Systems, Chassis and Neuroptics from planet junctions, the last part being rewarded on Pluto’s junction. Considering the New Strange starts from around Ceres, that’s about half the solar system you need to cover.

But once you have the blueprints for Chroma’s parts, you need to build Chroma’s parts, and they require Ember’s Neuroptics, Frost’s Chassis and Saryn’s Systems. You can get the blueprints for these by killing their related bosses (Sargus Ruk, Lt. Lech Kril and Kela De Thaym respectively). The blueprints, I should point out Ember’s and Frost parts, many people may already have their parts simply because they needed to re-fight those bosses to get the Systems, which are for some reason rarer than the other two parts.

But with Saryn, Kela De Thaym requires 100 25 Judgement points to be able to fight, and you can get these by fighting in Rathuum, an arena mode which can get you up to 20 points at a time depending on difficulty (this was changed around the time Octavia came out). The hardest level though is a little too hard for my shitty weapons, so I’m relegated to the easiest difficulty, against level 40 enemies, each time with a special negative modifier like “half shields”, “half health”, “half energy” or “half ability duration”. If you’re lucky, you’ll get the “Reinforcements” modifier which spawns extra enemies. The harder difficulties are against level 60 and 80 enemies.

Fuck you, Saryn.

Of course, when you get your required points, you need to go and fight Kela De Thaym. She’s actually a better boss than Lt. Lech Kril, but harder than Sargas Ruk. When you defeat her, you get your Saryn part and lose 25 Judgement points. With only a 22% chance of getting the Saryn Systems you need though, it’s tedious as heck constantly getting more points and going back and fighting Kela again.

On top of that, Kela is located on the third-from-last unlockable planet, Sedna. You have to unlock every other world apart from Eris, the Kuva Fortress and Level 4 of the Void to even GET to Kela and her Saryn parts.

Then finally, you need one last item to build Chroma – Volt’s Neuroptics. Ironically, this is by far the easiest part to acquire, since anyone who is in a half-decent clan has the ability to by Volt’s Neuroptics blueprint.

Of course, you then have to build all the parts. Each Chassis, Neuroptics and Systems takes 12 hours to build. Because you have to build Frost, Ember and Saryn’s parts before you can build Chroma’s parts, that’s 24 hours minimum spent just making Chroma’s components. THEN, assuming you built Volt’s Neuroptics the same time you built either the other Warframe parts or Chroma’s Chassis, System and Neuroptics, you then need to put Chroma together.

Which for some reason takes THREE DAYS.

Yes. Yes I fucking DO want to build Chroma.

For a character who is offered to you from Ceres and Jupiter, it seems insane that you have to do so much work to get one Warframe. Even release-day Nidus, who requires the War Within, the Eris Junction, his own quest and a salvage mission isn’t as hard to obtain as Chroma can be, but Nidus is the new character aimed at people who already have most frames, so that makes sense.

At the time of writing, I have JUST obtained the Saryn part I needed. On my 12th attempt, with a little help from Poptarts. 12 attempts means having to farm 650 judgement points. Literally the only positives so far have been that 1. I’ve had to use a different Warframe – Valkyr – to more easily farm (thus convincing me to obtain Valkyr Prime) and 2. the Ignis is actually useful in Kela’s fight.

Considering I’ve been at this on and off for about three months now, this is worse than that damn Continuity mod. And the sad thing is, Chroma isn’t even the hardest character to obtain. Warframes like Ivara, Mesa and Limbo are all even worse. Or *shudder* obtaining Nidus.